Remembered today as one of the great popularizers of Jewish history, in the inter-war year the Anglo-Jewish historian Cecil Roth was unable to secure an academic appointment until 1939. As such he turned to writing popular history as a means of support, and while some academic historians discounted his work (then and now), an examination of Roth’s correspondence with individuals such Henry Hurwitz of the Intercollegiate Menorah Society, reveal that Roth worked assiduously to develop an approach to history that would be both academically sound and “useful” to those readers who wanted to understand the contours of Jewish life.